Vitalik Buterin: Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin’s lovely Russian government is one of my enemies now.

This is from a podcast/interview Vitalik did a few days ago. Lots of interesting stuff including his love of Bitcoin, his confusion about why people use BNB smart chain, ETH's drawbacks and this part on his enemies:

Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin’s lovely Russian government is one of my enemies now.

I did talk to him five years ago. I believe in talking to people. I talked to Putin, I talked to the vice premier of Taiwan at one point, I talked to people in the government of Singapore, I’ve talked to people in Canada, the U.K. and lots of places.

But at the same time, there definitely are times where you make the judgements that you have given someone enough latitude and as much as it would be good to give someone even more love, unfortunately, at the present time, there are cities that are being bombed. There are millions of lives and peoples’ families and futures that are being potentially destroyed and cut short, and a beautiful country risks being turned into Syria. Ultimately, the first priority has to be doing all that we can to help people affected by that situation.

So that’s a really unfortunate thing, and I’ve been very public in speaking out about that. I do fully support Ukraine, and I do strongly oppose all of the characters that are complicit in trying to destroy Ukraine as a country and as a nation.

At one point, I used a Russian profanity that some Ukrainian soldiers made famous because of how they used it as a brave show of defiance against Russian soldiers that demanded they surrender. And I repeated it to the head of Russia today. So my general approach with stuff is that, I don’t believe in being mean 0% of the time. I believe in being mean like maybe 0.5% of the time, and if you’re mean only 0.5% of the time then that actually makes that meanness more effective.

Whereas, if you’re the sort of person that being mean is your default mode of discourse, then at some point people just stop paying attention to it.

The podcast with the timestamp where this part starts: https://youtu.be/CdgjGykrByM?t=1086